Electronic devices can provide a variety of functions including calendar and meeting-related functions as well as electronic messaging. Electronic devices can include several types of devices including desktop computers or mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless PDAs, and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities. These devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS and CDMA2000 networks.
Many portable electronic devices include a variety of applications for performing calendar and meeting-related functions, email functions, telephone functions, short message service (SMS) functions, Web browser functions and address book functions. Calendar applications allow users to track and manage appointments and meetings and to set reminders for such appointments and meetings. The information relating to meetings, for example, including the time, place and invitees, is commonly included in a calendared meeting event saved using the calendar application on an electronic device. This information is saved and may be selectively manipulated and displayed to the user in various formats to view monthly, weekly or daily calendared events.
Many calendar applications permit users to invite individuals to meetings and to be invited by other individuals to meetings by sending and receiving invitations by electronic mail. The invitees are specified by the sender of the invitation, through the calendar application. In some portable electronic devices, such invitations can be prepared and sent from the portable electronic device or received at the portable electronic device via wireless communication. A subroutine of the calendar application typically permits the user of the electronic device to accept or reject a meeting invitation from a user of another electronic device. Meetings for which an invitation is accepted at an electronic device, are automatically saved as calendared events to the calendar application of that electronic device. Similarly, meetings for which invitations are sent from an electronic device are also automatically saved as calendared events to the calendar application of that electronic device.
In preparation for scheduled meetings, it is common for users of an electronic device to send information to one or more of the attendees of the meeting. For example, one of the attendees may wish to circulate a message, an agenda, an update or brief prior to or following the meeting. Such messages can be sent electronically via email. To send the messages, the user of an electronic device creates a new email message using an email message application and the user must address the message to each meeting attendee or each intended recipient. This can be cumbersome especially in cases where an intended recipient is not included in the user's electronic address book. In such a case, the user can manually enter the intended recipient's email address in the appropriate user-editable portion of an address field of the email. In addition to being cumbersome, the manual entry of email addresses often leads to errors in addressing causing delivery failure of the email.
Improvements in messaging meeting attendees are therefore desirable.